How to Be a Sister

by Eileen Garvin

  Margaret sprinted for the restroom with my mother trailing behind smiling apologetically, leaving me alone at the table. Our cover was blown. I could feel it. The whole place was staring at the ladies’ room door, which Margaret had just slammed on our mother’s heels. All heads seemed to turn to me, the lone weirdo still at the Weirdo Table. Cover. Blown. Uncool. I told myself I didn’t care. I downed my wine and watched the waitress circulate the tiny room.

  This waitress was one of those eccentric Seattleites who had made the town so exotic to me when I first moved there from provincial Spokane. She must have been in her late thirties and was very pretty in a theatrical kind of way. She was wearing a sexy, 1930s-era dress with combat boots. Her lipstick was a badge that said, “I’m eccentric! Don’t fuck with me!” This woman was part of the reason that the café had gained an aura of celebrity. She did not really wait on people; she just kind of emotionally abused them and then brought them food after a really, really long time. She’d stop in the middle of an order to tell a joke or sing a song. All the diners would stop talking to listen and then applaud hugely. She was no server. She was an artist! Purposely and purposefully conspicuous. She was one of many such neighborhood celebrities in Seattle when I first moved there. If only I could be so interesting and sure of myself. Someone like her could save the publishing house, I thought. I slugged some more wine and watched her, jealous and intimidated.

  I heard the bathroom door bang again and saw Margaret wading through tables and chairs as she hurried back to our corner. It seemed like everyone was watching her as she plunked down in her chair saying, “There you go! You say excuse me, Eileen! That’s good manners!” Margaret grabbed her glass, took a big slurp of her root beer, and slammed it down on the table. My mother reappeared, all aflutter about the Alice in Wonderland mural on the bathroom wall, which she’d photographed. She had also popped into the men’s room to see if the mural continued in there. It did! She had pictures! She’d show me! All of this loud enough for other people to hear. I wanted to slither under the table.

  At this moment, the Celebrity Server sauntered over to our table to take our order. She stood over us, one hand on a cocked hip like she could barely stand it, she was so bored by us already. I quickly told her what I wanted, and then she shifted her exasperated gaze to my sister, which Margaret failed to notice. Like many people with autism, my sister doesn’t make eye contact as often as other people do. When she was in school, she and her classmates played card games to work on this simple part of social interaction that so many of us take for granted. It was rather hilarious to watch—four teenagers sitting around a table, cards fanned out in their hands, each one looking away from the rest, looking at the ceiling, the floor, the door. Every so often someone would mutter, “Gimme me alla your eights,” while he was gazing down at his knees.

  Eating dinner at a restaurant afforded multiple opportunities to help Margaret practice looking at people while she was talking. Ordering her dinner was one such occasion. But the server didn’t ask my sister what she wanted. She just turned her cold stare from me to Margaret. Saying anything, even “Gimme alla your eights,” would have been more helpful than this silence. Margaret simply didn’t understand this kind of shift as a nonverbal cue, although my mother and I did. My mother prompted Margaret to say what she wanted. My sister nodded and pointed at the menu. I mean, are you stupid? she seemed to be saying. We’re here for the spaghetti, right? What do you mean what do I want to eat? The whole reason we drove across town and waited outside in the dark for over an hour was because she’d been promised a plate of spaghetti, so what was with all the questions? My mother and I knew what she was thinking, but to practice normal social interaction, Mom gently urged Margaret to let the server in on our secret and let her know about the whole spaghetti thing.

  To be fair, it was noisy and she was busy, but the woman completely missed the fact that Margaret wasn’t making eye contact with her and didn’t notice the interaction among the three of us. She was annoyed and leaned in. “What? Didn’t hear that. What do you want?” Margaret, now looking at my mother, said, “You want spaghetti, please, Mom.” She was beginning to sound worried. By this time the server was visibly irritated with us, and it dawned on me that she wasn’t clueing in to Margaret’s difference. She just thought we were pokey, stupid tourists. Exasperated, she finally extricated the rest of our order, grabbed the menus from us, and stalked off. My mother and I patted Margaret’s hands and told her she’d done a good job. She let out a sigh and took a big gulp of her root beer.

  When our food came, my sister ate quickly and so did I, as I often do in Margaret’s company. For some reason I find it hard not to wolf down my food when my tablemate is doing so. She ate quickly at home, too, but I think the anxiety she was feeling in an unfamiliar place made her eat even faster. After a few minutes she put down her fork and sat back, looking pale. Although she’d eaten fast, she hadn’t eaten much and sat with her hands in her lap, braiding and unbraiding her fingers. About now I felt the full force of the guilt and remorse for trying to have things my way. We should never have come here, I thought. The room was too loud and crowded for my sister, and the spicy pasta—trying so hard to be special—was probably upsetting her stomach.

  Looking back, I recognize that there was so much more going on under the surface of this visit, the constant presence of certain truths that we never spoke aloud. I was mad at myself for not being more patient. I was so angry that Margaret had autism, that there was no cure, that she never seemed to get better, that she dominated my mother’s attention, that I didn’t know who I was supposed to be in this family or in this lifetime. I wasn’t ever my mother’s daughter. I was just Margaret’s sister. And nothing I did could change any of that, but I was too young and stubborn to swallow this complicated and barbed truth or to just walk away from it.

  About this time the Celebrity Server decided to launch into one of her solos. She paused right next to our table and began to sing a lively show tune. She stood over us brandishing her tray, trilling away, reveling in the attention of the entire restaurant. She was slightly off key and didn’t seem to care. Everyone stopped talking to watch her. As for me, I’d about had it with this woman and the atmosphere she was so bent in creating. The suburban girl rose up in me, feeling indignant about this big-city pretense. If you had asked me, a server was supposed to take your order and bring you your food. She was supposed to be worried about where your extra bread was, not wondering if she had everyone’s undivided attention. I was annoyed that she had trespassed so far into our personal space and yet refused to see us, to see Margaret struggling to communicate. I wanted to say something to make a dent in all that seemed to be wrong with the world—my sister’s disorder, this woman’s indifference, my own anger. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to say anything.

  Margaret had had it. Like many people with autism, she is acutely sensitive to sound. My sister also has a perfect sense of pitch and simply can’t bear to listen to music that is out of tune. So just as the server turned her face toward our table, her loud, flat voice pulling all the air out of the room, my sister put her fingers in her ears and let out the most terrific screech, right in the woman’s face. It was like a train whistle, but two octaves higher. The train bore down on all of us and passed into our inner ears. For a minute the world felt unbalanced, and I thought I might pass out. Then the train passed through and everything was all right again.

  I looked at the Celebrity Server, who was standing there with her mouth open, silent and staring. Then she dropped her tray to her side and scurried off to the kitchen, the door banging shut behind her. You could have heard a pin drop. The entire restaurant was staring at us in terrified silence. For once, I didn’t care. They could stare all they wanted. It wouldn’t change the fact that Margaret had slain the giant. Looking at their shocked faces, I was killing myself trying not to laugh, but I was also proud of my big sister for defending herself in the only way she knew how. I know it migh
t sound mean find humor in the fear of a room full of strangers, but I knew there was nothing to be afraid of. And it helped balance out the fact that my sister is scared so much of the time. After all, we all have to live in this world together. My mother reached and out and took Margaret’s hand, and we kept talking like nothing had happened. Soon my sister’s face relaxed.

  There was no more singing in Bizzarro that night. We three quietly finished our meal, and everyone else did, too, like they knew what was good for them. The server never came back to our table, but sent the host over to deal with us instead. Margaret ordered a bananas Foster, which she wolfed down. A few seconds later she suddenly went pale, grabbed her empty root beer mug, and vomited foamy ice cream barf up to the rim. The other diners were trying so very hard not to stare at our table that nobody noticed. I think we all knew it was time to throw in the towel at that point. And if our server hadn’t been such a cow, we would have cleaned it up. My mother would probably still be there, washing dishes and apologizing. Instead, we left an enormous tip and fled. I never went back.

  On the way home, Margaret was quiet in the backseat, staring out the window at the light rain that had started to fall. Seattle was swallowed up in the darkness and had turned on her lights to outline her tall and curvy silhouette. I sat in the front seat, giving my mom directions and looking out at the dark sky hanging over the Puget Sound, my heart full. When we were about halfway home, Margaret sighed and said, “That’s better, Mom.” Then in her very solemn voice, she said, “You don’t yell in the restaurant, Mom. It’s bad manners. You don’t yell.” And I wondered who she was talking about.

  The images of that trip were captured in my mother’s photographs and in my memory: Margaret and me at Volunteer Park. Margaret at the Space Needle. Margaret and me sitting on the Murphy bed at the John Winthrop Apartments. Brendan’s father took us all for a boat ride in Portage Bay, and there are photos of Margaret sitting in the bow of the little boat with her arm around Honey, the big yellow dog that would one day be the ring bearer at my wedding. I’ve looked at the photographs so many times that they have become like woodcuts in my memory: the shapes of our bodies, the outline of the buildings and horizon like permanent marks on a canvas. These images, with sharp corners and deep grooves, have worn their mark year after year in my memory and our history.

  There were more cafés, more outbursts. When I took my mother to meet my future mother-in-law, Margaret threw herself backward off Sharon’s couch and rolled around on the floor with her shirt riding up over her big tummy, yelling and kicking her shoes against the brand-new carpet. During an anxious morning, she had picked a scab on her chin and bled onto the couch pillows, something I always wondered if Sharon noticed. The stain was still there when this couch was handed down to us years later. I watched her writhing around on the floor, seeing flashes of her belly and big breasts as her shirt flopped around, and thought, “This is not normal. This is not what I was hoping for when I introduced my mother to Brendan’s family.” But that’s what I got.

  On the last day of their visit, Margaret started to lose her cool at a café where we had hoped to eat breakfast with Brendan and his parents. My mother tried to calm her down by reading the menu with her, encouraging her to choose something to eat. Unfortunately, Margaret wanted Froot Loops. There was no cereal on the menu. My mother and I looked at each other across the table, depressed, unspoken partners in the minor social catastrophe that we knew was sure to follow when we told Margaret that there were no Froot Loops to be had. In the middle of this silent struggle, Brendan jumped up and ran across the street to the neighborhood market, bought a box of Froot Loops, and ran back. “There’s the Froot Loops!” my sister crowed, grabbing the box out of his hand. We were saved again. And yet never saved. When Mom and Margaret finally left, waving and tooting the horn, I went upstairs and lay down on the floor, which now felt like the place I belonged. I had a migraine for three days.

  MORE THAN TEN years had passed between the night Margaret barfed at Bizzarro and the planning of her first-ever solo trip to visit me. The image of the glassful of frothy bananas Foster was still as fresh in my mind as the night I threw a napkin over it and ran away into the happy obscurity of the city night. And yet so much had happened in our lives. We had grown, we had aged, and I hoped that I had learned.

  And yet some things would never change. I knew I would never be privy to what my sister was thinking. She would likely continue to be ruled by the stress and compulsion that the disorder seems to wield. I couldn’t save her from its whims, but I could stop taking them so personally. We wouldn’t ever have the closeness of the fantasy sisters in my mind, the people who could talk on the phone and pick up where they had left off. We wouldn’t have normal family vacations, but I wasn’t sure I knew what that meant anyway. Normal for me had ceased to mean, “What I don’t have.” Normal was what I’d wanted back then. Normal meant “like other people.” Normal meant “ordinary.” But I’d been lucky enough to trade that desire for something much more interesting.

  During my recent quest, one thing had become very clear to me: I would live with Margaret’s autism for the rest of my life. One expert put it plainly: Siblings of people with disabilities have all the same hardships as parents—only for longer. As another writer put it, the impact of having a sibling with autism never ends. Parents usually die first, and we siblings are left to sort things out.

  But other points remained unclear to me. What role would I take? Full-time caregiver did not seem a likely choice for me, although I’d been hung up on that phantom obligation for years. One reason it had been so easy for me to stay in New Mexico was that I thought I’d be stuck holding the bag if I took part in any way. But running away no longer seemed like an option. Home had called me back, and Margaret, difficult as she is, was part of the siren song. Middle ground, then—was that where I belonged? Could I carve out a place for Margaret in my life, and could she find room for me in hers?

  My relationship with my sister was a paradox. Although we could never communicate like other people, I would get more of the genuine article than I did from most relationships, because she never hid her feelings. Whenever I saw Margaret, I knew she would remember me and would greet me in exactly the same way. She might be nervous or not, but she was always expecting me. It was pretty simple, really. She expected me to show up from time to time, and by God, I’d better be there when I said I would. She always opened the door when I drove up, even if she didn’t always let me come in the house. “Hi, Eileen!” she’d say, like she had just seen me yesterday, and then she’d get in the car, slam the door, and wait for me to drive us to wherever we were bound When Eileen Gets Here.

  I was fairly certain that this would happen when I went to meet her and Clifford at the appointed pickup spot. I was pretty sure my sister would enjoy the drive from her house to Richland, Washington. After that, all bets were off. We’d decided to meet for lunch at Red Robin, where Clifford and I would eat and she might not. She might be happy to see me, or she might be quiet and withdrawn. She might get upset and scream, but Red Robin is pretty noisy anyway, so if that happened, one of us would simply get up and walk outside with her. And after we had paid the bill, I could only hope that instead of getting back in the car with Clifford, she’d decide that she felt like coming with me for the Vacation.

  Once she decided to put her suitcase in the car, I’d be satisfied. Unlike the rest of us, Margaret never hides her feelings. She can’t. So at least I knew she wouldn’t come for a visit unless she felt like it, unless she was all in. That’s the thing about Margaret. She can’t help but be exactly who she is, so now I knew what I was getting—the unexpected, always, but the real deal. My elevated expectations had slowly departed along with the yearning for some kind of normalcy. I no longer expected to blend in when I was with my sister, nor did I hope to blend in this or any other corner of my life. Blending in means you’ve been worked into the sauce, assimilated to the point of being indistinguishable. We sho
uld not hope to live undistinguished lives, but to revel in the rich bits and pieces that stand out and give us our flavor.

  Ruminating on this, I finished putting away the groceries and went upstairs to put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room, because my sister was coming to visit.

  11.

  how to be a sister

  Etiquette was never intended to be a rigid set of rules. It is, rather, a code of behavior that is based on consideration, kindness and unselfishness.

  —On Good Manners, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

  WE ARE STANDING together, naked, our small toes curling against the cold floor of the linoleum in the bathroom. Cowboys and Indians crawl up and down the wallpaper toward the high window, shooting over each other’s heads across a cactus desert. I am three and shivering. You are six and silent. I hug my arms to my chest as we stand there waiting outside the high, gleaming white sides of the bathtub. I bounce on my toes. Cold. Cold. Cold. You just stand there, not saying anything, arms at your sides, impassive.

  Here comes Ann, in through the door. Ann the Beautiful. Our older sister is already almost nine, a celebrity in my small universe. I love her so much it hurts. Too bad she hates me. Hates both of us. For being babies, for not being able to do anything, not even turn on the goddamn bathtub faucets for ourselves. And yet it doesn’t bother me that she treats me with the scorn of the oldest child, who is burdened with the rest of us four younger kids. I love her all the more for being superior.